ruined by prosperity than by adversity. If we had our own way in life,
before this we would have been impersonations of selfishness and
worldliness and disgusting sin, and puffed up until we would have been
like Julius Cæsar, who was made by sycophants to believe that he was
divine, and the freckles on his face were as the stars of the
firmament.

One of the swiftest transatlantic voyages made last summer by the
"Etruria" was because she had a stormy wind abaft, chasing her from
New York to Liverpool. But to those going in the opposite direction
the storm was a buffeting and a hinderance. It is a bad thing to have
a storm ahead, pushing us back; but if we be God's children and
aiming toward heaven, the storms of life will only chase us the sooner
into the harbor. I am so glad to believe that the monsoons, and
typhoons, and mistrals, and siroccos of the land and sea are not
unchained maniacs let loose upon the earth, but are under divine
supervision! I am so glad that the God of the Seven Stars is also the
God of Orion! It was out of Dante's suffering came the sublime "Divina
Commedia," and out of John Milton's blindness came "Paradise Lost,"
and out of miserable infidel attack came the "Bridgewater Treatise" in
favor of Christianity, and out of David's exile came the songs of
consolation, and out of the sufferings of Christ came the possibility
of the world's redemption, and out of your bereavement, your
persecution, your poverties, your misfortunes, may yet come an eternal
heaven.

Oh, what a mercy it is that in the text and all up and down the Bible
God induces us to look out toward other worlds! Bible astronomy in
Genesis, in Joshua, in Job, in the Psalms, in the prophets, major and
minor, in St. John's Apocalypse, practically saying, "Worlds! worlds!